Authors: Alan Dean Foster
I worked the Zen’s tactiles until I knew everything there was to know about the container I was into. It seemed pretty promising,
but it was a little early to start gloating. We didn’t have anything yet except a little access. First I subbed the program
dupe I’d shaped and that zeeped into the matrix smooth as lotion on a beach bunny’s buns. So far so
bueno.
Implementation was a lot trickier. It’s one thing to shape a program and insert it, another to get it up an’ runnin’ in the
box. I grabbed the shipping info from the container and inverted it, got a good look at the structure, and dumped it into
the waiting template I’d so carefully installed. Then I made kind of a silent prayer and plugged the template into the ass
end of the container’s up-and-run.
Chuy was tugging on my shoulder as I ran a couple of redundancy checks. “Come on, homber! If you ain’t done it by now, you
ain’t never going to. Let’s get out of here.”
I pulled out, leaving nothing behind me in the distrib yard box but empty crunch, nothing to trace the tickle. I was fumbling
to get the Zenitrov back into its holster as Chuy half led, half dragged me back through the yard. As we ran, making no noise
in our expensive pylon skimmers, I could hear the voices of two Eyes just passing behind us and a chill went up my back. Too
close, man.
Chuy didn’t say nothing until we’d orphaned the stolen Solarmax and were back in his clunker. “So? How’d it go, ‘Stebo?”
“I don’ know.”
His tone turned unfriendly. “What you mean, you don’t know?”
I looked earnest. “No way to know if it worked until Thursday.”
“Why Thursday?”
“I thought I explained it to you. Everything depends on the container’s shipping instructions. Its stats said it’s programmed
to join a train heading north on Thursday at five
P.M
. It won’ move ‘til then.”
Chuy looked thoughtful. “So we can’t do nothing but wait until then.”
I nodded.” ‘Til later, really. For when I set the template.”
He sucked in a deep breath. “Amigo, it gonna be three nervous days.”
He wasn’t half as nervous all three days as I was that first hour.
Thursday
noche
found the four of us hanging near the receiving yard behind the Garcilasco Mall. Nothing unusual about that. The delivery
area was bare except for a couple of empty containers. At two in the morning there was nobody around, not even an Eye. No
reason for a patrol here. Even the Ensenada police didn’t come around often. They didn’t need to. There were easier places
to break into than an armored, fully alarmed mall, with its thermosensitive vits and animorphed Dobermans. As for the loading
dock, there was nothing there to steal.
Kilbee had actually rented the off-loader transport. If some federale did stumble accidentally onto us, we’d tell him we were
just waiting to move a friend the next morning and couldn’t sleep, so we’d decided to lay out for the night and suck a few
sense sticks. Chuy an’ Kilbee decided the story would sound better if it didn’t come from four guys sitting in a stolen truck.
Huong tossed his stick stub through the window and glared at me. “I think you’ve just been pissing wind, ‘Stebo. This ain’t
gonna work.”
I checked my watch for the fourth time in the past half hour. “It’s not time yet, Huong. There could be unexpected holdups
in the network, extra traffic. All week I’ve been watching the vit news. No thefts reported from the system, so nobody’s found
my artwork. Abstain, man. Everything’s workin’.” I spoke boldly. I didn’t have no choice.
Kilbee was fondling his vibrato. “You talk real big, ‘Stebo. Maybe you think you’re smarter than us ‘cause you can fold a
little crappy box work?”
“Ease off,” said Chuy. He stared single-mindedly at the two maglev lines that led to the big loading dock behind the mall.
“Give it time.”
“Yeah, sure.” Kilbee turned to gaze tiredly out the window, resting his head against his closed fist and slumping in his seat.
I sat up fast. “Something’s coming.” Everyone forgot about everything else and sat up straight to look.
It was a container, ambulatin’ smoothly according to program, heading toward the back of the loading dock. I tried to see
past it but there didn’t appear to be anyone following it on the track or on the street nearby. I felt a hand squeezing my
arm hard. Chuy, his eyes glittering.
We piled out of the truck and just watched while the container, neat as you please, slid down the elevated induction track
and came to a stop exactly as I’d programmed it to. Kilbee came out of his trance long enough to give me a quick, totally
unexpected hug. Then he was backing the truck around while the rest of us anxiously scanned the mall’s access street.
The container’s module obediently responded to the come-hither call from the standard beacon in the truck cab and slid inside.
Huong and I shut the rear door and away we went, the whole damn container snugged safely within.
At the abandoned warehouse down in the old harbor industrial district we cracked that beautiful sucker. Chuy had picked a
car destined for the Dai-Syntec Combine works up at Algo-dones. The container was crammed with all kinds of good stuff: sense-screens,
blank moto paks, expensive nodulators.
When our private little fire sale was fully concluded and fenced two weeks later we gleaned about six hundred thousand, including
an unexpected eleven thousand for the vacuumed container itself. Remarked and calligraphed, with a brand-new identifying module,
it was sent cruising surreptitiously south toward Salvador and a new life.
Mi compadres
were more than a little spizzed, you know?
There was nothing about our abscond in the vits for three weeks. Then I found a small item in the Strip financial section,
had a hard copy made, and showed it to the gang at Chuy’s.
“Dai-Syntec Corporation today announced the disappearance—see, man, they don’t say theft—of a container load of valuable componentry.
Insurance adjusters are investigating, but the loss is believed due to box error.” Box error my ass, I half shouted, and everyone
had fine words, mostly obscene, for the investigators at Dai-Syntec.
I could imagine the consternation in Company Receiving when their container arrived—and there was nothing there. Their box
screens would show the container, whose simple rectangular appearance and markings I had artfully duped in VR, right where
it belonged on the delivery track. Instruments would dutifully register its arrival weight as six point two tons, including
cargo. But when they’d go out to the unloading dock to look for it, there’d be
nada
there. The boxman would check his stats and visual and there’d be the container, big as life. Except there wasn’t nothing
in actual reality. Only in virtual reality. A ghost container. No wonder they were sayin’ the loss was due to box error.
As soon as the real container had deviated from its original programming and split from its northbound train, my template
had kicked in and subbed a virtual one in its space. All the way north, at all the checkpoints, monitors would’ve recorded
the virtual substitute according to the eager feed from my art and indicated nothing amiss. Meanwhile our container had turned
sharply south and wended its merry way to the mall dock. If anyone had actually flown over the train as it was speeding north
and run a real-time inspection they’d have
seen a container-sized gap between a Simas mobile reservoir and one from China. The whole business wouldn’t have worked in
the twentieth cen, when a train consisted of a line of cars dragged along by a single energy source located at the front.
But with each induction container individually powered, it worked just fine for us.
All the poor sucks at Dai-Syntec ended up with was a lot of virtual confusion.
We celebrated for a week, and then flattened. We had plenty of money, too much for Chuy to launder all at once, but nobody
was hurting for kosh. We stayed smart, too. Nobody ran out and bought six cars an’ twelve platinum chains. We had our fun,
but quietly, even took a month in the sun at Cocos Annex; soaking up the UV, overawing the SCUBRA ferns in their tight diving
suits, and cruising with the hammerheads.
Six months later we did it again, but this go-around only realized about a hundred fifty thou. Chuy hadn’t picked such a good
one this time. Amazing how fast we got spoiled. We didn’t push it, though. Didn’t want to risk making a pattern, or leaving
a trail for some Intuit to sniff out. So we waited another three months before hitting again, and this time we tried a completely
different part of the yard.
Chuy like to spizz when we cracked that container.
“Holy Virgin of Guadeloupe!” I remember him hissing, half chokin’ on the exclamation. Huong and Kilbee didn’t have a clue,
but I did, and I didn’t say a thing. Couldn’t. But I know my eyes got big.
Huong dipped into the crate Chuy had popped and scooped up a handful of carefully bubble-packed cotton candy. “What is this
stuff?”
“Superconducting composite fibers,” Chuy told him. “They use this stuff to put together
big
boxes. The kind that run the phone companies and military hardware. It’s all rare-earth doped under special conditions. You
know what this shit costs, senwhore?”
Huong found out soon enough, as did the rest of us. We
made a million and a half and this time you didn’t have to search the vit news to find out about the skrag. It was all over
even the general broadcasts by the first of next week. You could smell the Intuits the company hastily hired searching for
a clue, a hint, anything. Even our tough-ass purchaser split for a
rapido
vacation down Sudamerica way as soon as the deal was done-did, it having gotten too hot suddenlike in Ensenada to stick around.
We just hung at Chuy’s place and savored all the noise.
This time I’d added a little fillip to the riff, too (by now I was gettin’ pretty cocky). Instead of putting in a VR-VW program
that would remain locked in the box, I had it dissipate in the mid of the desert halfway to Tucson. For days the vit news
was dense with shots of frustrated federales swarming over a bare patch of cactus and sand out in the omphalos of noplace,
where the container was supposedly plucked off the rail, scratching along beneath the maglev tracks, sweating and lookin’
serious unhappy. The only thing they found was an eloping college couple from TSU and a couple of poker-faced chuckawallas.
We laughed ourselves silly.
But the heat was getting
caliente
serious, and we talked about quitting. Chuy made investments for us all, and we had plenty of kosh in the Isthmus to last
each of us a lifetime. We discussed it and habled it for half a year, and finally decided to give the game one more spin.
Now that I look back at that time I think it was for the kicks, you know? You get addicted to success. Theft is its own high,
fiscal remunerations aside.
We checked the yard three times before we decided to go ahead, but any extra security had faded away in the months since our
last visit. After the furor over the fiber filch had died down, things got pretty much back to normal. The ennui didn’t look
like a feint. Chuy and I went in as usual, lookin’ for something different this time. One more big skrag and we’d dump the
Zenitrov and its damning peripherals and my clever artwork in the middle of the Golfo. One more.
We had to hide once to avoid a trio of Eyes, waiting half
an hour until we were sure they were long gone. Then Chuy called me over to a cold car. I waited and watched while he studied
the markings, the design.
“I don’t know what the hell’s in here,” he whispered to me, “but it oughta be interesting. Says organics under cold.”
“Shit, Chuy,” I muttered, “we gonna steal a load of chickens?”
“C’mon, omber. Where’s your curiosity? It’s got the profound max security seal, which means it’s full of valuable Bio. We
can get rid of anything before it degrades.” In the galvanic darkness of the yard, his eyes were shining. “Let’s try skragging
something a little different.”
“What the hell.” I got into the spirit a little. Chuy’s enthusiasm was always infectious. “Let’s do it.” I unpacked the Zenitrov.
We greeted the diverted cargo in a low-level container rental facility south of the city. We never loaded one into a truck
from the same place twice. Meanwhile its Virtual Dupe was racing north toward Greater LaLa. The destination alone indicated
that the contents were valuable. Otherwise why ship through Ensenada instead of LaLa direct? I admit I was curious.
Thirty minutes later Kilbee backed the truck into the warehouse space he’d rented under a fictitious company name. Chuy had
set it up, real legal and fancy. We even had stationery and holoed business cards, just for this one skrag. It was all part
of the game.
We dropped the rear end of the truck and went to work on the container. A blast of cool air rushed out to envelop us when
the door finally hummed aside. We went up and in. It was chilly in the container, but well above freezing.
The shipping crates were a light polypropylene mix, sealed instead of locked. We had to wait while Huong hunted up the right
tools to open them. After all, we didn’t want to damage our valuable cargo, whatever the hell it was.
The lid snapped off a bright red crate the size of a desktop. Beneath was another lid, transparent. Inside, nestled in a cushioning
bed of puffy insulation, was what looked like a dead parrot.
“It’s not a parrot.” Chuy ran his modified notex over the embedded lading slip. “It’s a blue and gold macaw. From Ecuador.
Destination: Haute Animale Pet Emporium, Bel-Air, LaLa.”
“Well shit,” muttered Huong. “A frozen bird.” Equally put off, I remembered what I’d said to Chuy back in the yard about skragging
frozen chickens.
Chuy, however, didn’t seem too disappointed. “First off, it ain’t frozen. It’s in an anabiotic state.”
“Say what?” Kilbee made a face.
“Don’t you guys never read nothing? They can ship anything alive this way and it gets to its destination unspoiled They substitute
a special kind of trehalose for the glucose in the body. That lets the cell membranes shut down safely. Then they chill it
to near freezing, slow down the metabolic rate so that the body uses about twenty-five times less oxygen. Swap the trehalose
for normal glucose, float the body in warm water, give it an adrenaline boost and back it comes, squawking and screeching.”